Thurs. chat + Michigan at Indiana: Discuss it here

Oh, yes. We’ll combine our normal Thursday chat with the game discussion. What a way to start New Year’s Eve. If CoverItLive allowed me to spray you all with cheap champagne, I would. And, the way those guys come up with technology, I expect to be doing just that by 2011.

Hope to see you at 11. I assure you it will be at least twice as awesome as Ryan Seacrest babbling from Times Square.

Off subject of basketball and on to football: I’m interested in coaching the football program at IU. Look at my record with Texas Tech, I win games! I took my teams to bowl games in every season that I was a head coach at Texas Tech. Hire me and I will lead you to the promise land! You will actually be able to afford facility upgrades and be able to recruit.

What has Bill Lynch given to IU? Nothing but excuses.

I’m Mike Leach and I look forward to being IU’s next head football coach.

Unfortunately, the Texas Tech administration and I haven’t seen “eye to eye” on certain issues. They were looking to get rid of me for any little thing. The student athlete that was involved in this situation has a parent that works for ESPN. Unfortunately, with ESPN’s name and the pressure Texas Tech felt, they fired me. The truth will come out and I did nothing wrong.

I graduate my players and take my teams to bowl games. I have a higher graduation rate than your coach, Bill Lynch. I bring in a lot of money to Texas Tech which allows them to build nice facilities and recuit. To my knowledge, IU continues to complain about they have no money in their athletic budget and alumni donations are decreasing. Yes, IU recently upgraded a couple facilities, but those have been over due for years. Plus, there are facilities that still need attention, but IU has no choice, but to ignore it due to their athletic budget.

Will you be the one to change this? Or, will you continue to go with the flow and support a program and coach that has been horrible for years? Can you imagine how much money selling out “The Rock” for every game would bring in? I can because I did it at TT.

Your coach, Bill Lynch, hasn’t even broke .500 unless you count the year after Coach Hep (wasn’t his players or his direction). I win games, period!

Will you listen to your alumni and fans? Or, will you continue to have a horrible program?

I’m willing to wait a year for the position at IU, but after that the offer is off the table.

One question: what has Bill Lynch given to Indiana University besides excuses?

You could NEVER get this job. What most don’t realize is that the IU football job is the best and easiest job in America. You only need to win 1 conference game a year, and we will pat you on the back and call it “improvement.” We are so optimistic, that we’ll never question your ability. On top of that, the AD will tell you “of course you’ll be back for more years,” the good majority of the blogging community will vehemently defend you, we will build you new practice facilities. Your meager salary will seem like taking candy from a baby.

If you really want a place to slack off and work on your retirement portfolio, you’d love this job. Unfortunately, we don’t hire your type. If you’ve made it to more than one bowl game, and have a winning D1 career record, you are overqualified for this position.

Here at IU, we believe that leaving a football coach in place long enough – any coach – will create success. Let me reiterate: it doesn’t matter who. We should have realized this with Cam Cameron and Gerry DiNardo. Their downfall was not that they were bad coaches or that our administration made unimaginative hires or uncompetitive offers. We simply forgot to leave them in place long enough.

If you don’t believe this theory, Mike, then do a little experiment: take some charcoal from your BBQ and bury it an estimated 140 kilometers below the surface of your backyard. I guarantee you that between 1-3 billion years later, your distant kin will discover that in the place where you buried the charcoal, a big fat diamond has emerged on the surface.

We are smart here, fella. Much too smart to bother with a fella like you.

How damn depressing..We lose our leading scorer/star on the basketball team and we’re back to talking about dreadful football at Indiana University(And so..so..many aliases..What’s up with that?)…God help us all.

a) CT Hoosier, Dougy and JPat
b) willing to spend a night in an electrical closet
c) in exchange for a good hire IU football coach

Hmmm… let me first say that there’s a shortage of quality electrical closets these days but — if we found one, and I can’t promise you guys anything yet — would the football fans be willing to share the closet and the night with stevealford who has privately expressed a similar wish towards a better hire (and I think you know who) in the basketball department?

“Diamond (a good coach) is made up of carbon (crappy MAC coach). Carbon that has been subject to extremely high pressure and heat for a long time becomes diamond. The longer the carbon is exposed to such conditions, the larger the diamond that will be formed. Over millions of years, carbon deposits slowly crystallize into diamond.

A natural place where the extreme conditions needed to form diamonds exist is deep inside the Earth. At some 90 miles or 150 kilometers under the continental crust, the pressure is known to be around 5 gigapascals and the temperature around 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,200 degrees Celsius.

Natural diamonds are brought to the surface of the Earth by volcanic emission. The hot molten lava cools down and solidifies into rock within which diamonds can be found.

I just have to start off by asking, Why is it always the case that if someone questions something that Crean does (Who is imperfect, just like the rest of us) People start crying not a true fan, but then the same people turn around and complain about everything Bill Lynch does? It makes no sense, and I am not even the one making the comments about Crean. Although I have questions he still needs to answer, he has done well so far here and I look forward to the future. (Note: This does not apply to Trolls or SteveAlford who instead of bringing their opinion in an acceptable way, feel the need to make up 20 names to post under to tell themselves how smart they are.)

All of our athletic coaches have supporters and haters, just like they did when we had Mallory and Knight. It will always be the case. Being a passionate fan is great, and it entitles everyone to their opinions, but our opinions have nothing to do with who coaches our teams. If you want that, then make something of yourself and go make more money, donate it to the school, and say I will give you X amount of dollars if you build a new assembly hall and hire this guy for football. If you can’t do that then please take into account that besides Fred Glass, donors, and administrators, there is an important group everyone overlooks. The players.

Lots of people cried foul when Freitag was let go, but he didn’t have the players support. Lynch is kept, and he does have the players support 100%. Talk to a few guys, they love him. If you want more proof, look at Bryan Paytons tweet to Kellenberger yesterday saying he truly believes that Lynch will be here longer than 2 years.

Say what you will, but I like to see three things out of a coach.

1. Passion
2. Results
3. Player Support

All of our favorite coaches have that. The two most debated each have a couple of those but not all three. (Crean and Lynch) neither has results yet, so give it their contracts and if by then they can’t pull it off, then go nuts. Until then, why not try to bring up valid points about certain plays, or strategies that everyone can weigh in on and learn from rather than just lump more coals on someone to make the same point you have made for 6 months? Will Lynch improve the team in the next 2 years? Who knows, but the results haven’t come about yet. Until then, why not realize that within the athletic offices, Bill Lynch has the same support from the other coaches that Tom Crean does, whether he has it from fans or not. That is because he works hard, has the passion, and gets his players support while graduating fine young men. If Tom Crean and every other coach says give him a chance, I’m willing to do that. I’m not even sure I believe hes the right man to do it, but I would love for him to prove me wrong because he is a good man who will not be giving IU a black eye anytime soon. If he doesn’t pull it off, well then I wish him the best and look forward to whoever we hire, but its time to stop hating Lynch for everything he does and even some things that he can’t control. Let’s all move on and talk about the great plays that Jordy is going to make today, or how Elston put up 14 points and grab 8 boards in his first big ten game, or whatever else is an achievement worth talking about.

Sorry for the rant, but this place used to be great and have educated discussions and posters. Now it is just sloppy and ignorant. Heres to hoping its just a cylce.

Hoagland,
You are sorely mistaken if you think I use multiple names. I am sure Korman could verify that for you since it seems to bother you so deeply.
You are a troll for blindly following these coaches who lead us nowhere. Also, your thread is too long. Nobody will actually read all of it.

I find it amusing that a post trashing a guy who has no business leading people was taken as an endorsement of somebody else. Most of the folks who took that route are in the “read the content, disregard the name” camp. LMAO.

It also tells you all you need to know about the lip service people give to priorities other than winning. Don’t talk to me about graduation rates and clean recruiting when you’re locking people with head injuries in closets with nowhere to sit. Are you kidding me?

Thanks for your opinion. I am truly glad to hear you post under one name, I wish others would do the same. I was under the false impression that you were a big culprit of this from past boards. My apologies. You have ruffled some feathers. I also do really enjoy the fact that you aren’t affraid to bring up an opinion that is out of the norm. The only thing I don’t like about your posts, is that you always do what you just did and try to make them personal to anyone who doesn’t think like you. There is no right or wrong, these are all opinions.

I come here for the discussion and to support my Hoosiers. I’m not trying to make anything personal or pick a fight with anyone. I’m open to your opinion and anyone elses if they want to make it in a respectful way. We know you want Steve Alford as the basketball coach instead of Crean. That’s a fine opinion for you, now move on to a new point or topic, or move to New Mexico’s boards. As far as blindly following, that I do not do. I have plenty of opinions and complaints about both Lynch and Crean, but I also realise they are the coaches for the time being, so it does 0 good to just complain about them being the coach. Why not try to find ways to do the best we can with the cards we are dealt until we are allowed a new hand?

“Sorry for the rant, but this place used to be great and have educated discussions and posters. Now it is just sloppy and ignorant. Heres to hoping its just a cycle.”

This is just such a stupid statement. I don’t even know where to begin. Blogs have never been the idyllic symposium of discussion that this poster implies. They have always been full of trolls, GooFballs, Homers, and loudmouths, in addition to the fabled intellectual sports mind. It is free speech in action, and like it or not, it is what you get. Nostalgically waxing poetic about the good old days of pure, intellectual sports conversations sounds ingenuous and silly.

On top of that, who gets to determine what is intelligent, anyway? It’s all a matter of opinion in the end. Besides, I can remember talking football a few years back with guys like Mike P, who is about as solid and knowledgeable as they come. Even then, there was plenty of name-slinging, winding up, unsubstantiated claims, and fact-stretching. It’s the nature of the blog, which is a microcosm of society. We may not like the liberals with anti-war signs on the corners, or the Fox-sponsored conservative “tea party” gatherings. They may seem obnoxious and uninformed to us. We may not like the emotional rants of Husky Tom and Downing’s 5th, or the whiny cynicism of stevealford. But they are good in the long run- they strengthen our own convictions.

Now, back to sports, it is very easy to take opposite positions regarding Lynch and Crean. Lynch was fired by a MAC school and had a 37-53 D1 record before taking over at IU. Crean was 190-96 when hired, with 8 postseason appearances. It doesn’t get more elementary than that. A loser vs. a winner.

Per your last point, Turner Gill was a hot coaching name for the past couple of years, and he has a losing record. Records at a previous school and conference can only mean so much. The Big Ten is not the Big East in style of play for basketball. All the really matters is what talent can someone bring in with their currrent position and place of employment, and how does their system work against the big ten? Lynch can put up points in the big ten with what some would consider a second teir or inferior quarterback (I’ll take Chappell any day) however his defenses struggle. give him time to recruit a defense and get some redshirts in as backups so we go more like 11-20 deep than the 5-10 deep on defense we have been. It probably wont be next year for the defense, but the year after when some of the kids who were redshirts last year, and this year are in there, we will know what Lynch can do.

Todd Lickleiter was killer in the Horizon league… Hows his big ten record?

Better watch out, folks…Husky Tom is calling an audible…He’s picked up on the strong side Lynch blitz and is sending Verbal Art(or is it Art Verbal?)in motion….Verbal Art will stay at home to block and Washington Apple is running a deep…very deep post pattern…TOUCH DOWN!!

Downing’s 5th is locked in a shed with his basketball head…. dreaming of his diamond coach.

We may not like the emotional rants of Husky Tom and Downing’s 5th, or the whiny cynicism of stevealford. But they are good in the long run- they strengthen our own convictions.

Translation: “Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections.”  “When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others.”  “Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.”  “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”  “Compete, dude, compete!”

Great TEAM effort…Stupendous interior passing by Jones…hungriness and aestheticism in the paint by Watford…gutty defensive tenacity by Rivers..leadership and clutch free throw shooting by Hulls(also known as “5G”..Game, Glory, Guts, Gumption… all over his Grumpy face)…and I must add very well coached game by Crean…The man does entertain..

Though only 2 points…Pritchard was very active and played a nice game.

Happy New Year!

How about that exceptional free throw shooting, by Mr. Jordan ...says:

Lynch couldn’t put up the points against a less than stellar OSU team, at home, in front of an eager crowd. He couldn’t put up the points against a 3-9 VIrginia team. He couldn’t put up the points against Purdue until it was too late.

It’s not about how many points you score; it’s about WHEN you score them.

Congrats to Coach Crean for achieving what COach Lynch couldn’t do- for beating an overrated Michigan team without making the injury excuse.

You know, I thought we got past the name calling. But Husky can’t stand to be disagreed with and has to besmirch and name call. I’m not going to retaliate, cause I think we were all moving in the right direction. But civil discourse, at least with me, is not in Husky’s arsenal. I just want him and everybody else know that my original post referenced nothing that could have been offensive. Not one damn thing.

GooFballs. Unique capitalization, emphasizing the G and F. Reminiscent of another name I was called previously. Look, I’m done with this thread and won’t be back, so let’s not bother with more nonsense, ok?

GooFball, I think, was considered a name call because of the initials G and F in the context that we all remember so well.

But I am sure Husky meant no harm.

Here’s Husky, dude, on a visit to Budapest. (@0:38 a technical is finally assessed.)

And this encapsulates Husky’s philosophy of life (to the extent that I have been able to figure it out). Husky is free to make fun of me if he thinks I am mis-representing him.

The best proof that Husky truly meant no harm is the very content of his message: he was complaining that on this blog there are no goofballs. Hence, nobody could feel name called. But, under the circumstances, the spelling can be considered a bit risqué.

Go Figure. Thanks for the wrap-up, my Good Friend Downing. Time to put on some Simon and GarFunkle, pour myself a little GlenFiddich, and watch some good Gridiron Fun as the Buckeyes Go For the Rose Bowl Victory against those GodawFul ducks.